Chat to him about his acquisition strategy and he says he’d rather work on improving Incitec’s fertiliser and mining explosives assets than chase a company “threatening" acquisition.

Talk to him about the increasing chatter in the market that Incitec should demerge Australia’s biggest fertiliser producer from its Dyno Nobel explosives arm and he is resolute – not on his watch.

Fazzino, the son of a mop salesman who grew up in Melbourne’s working-class suburb of Kingsbury, has a strategy that at first blush hardly sets the world on fire: focus on generating more with what Incitec has already got.

Fazzino, the company’s former chief financial officer, is more worried about being prudent and delivering consistent returns than about grandstanding and is confident this approach will work for shareholders.

Formed in 2003 through the merger of Pivot and Incitec Fertilisers, a period of “steady as she goes" is foreign to those that populate its walls. It was spun out of mining services group Orica in 2006 as a pure play fertiliser division, becoming only two years later the world’s second-biggest mining explosives maker by buying Dyno Nobel.

In a little over two years since Fazzino was promoted to the top job, Incitec’s market capitalisation has almost doubled to more than $6 billion, recovering some of the lost ground created by the global financial crisis, which sent fertiliser prices plunging and dampened demand for mining explosives.

Incitec has cut $400 million in costs in the past five years through efficiency programs under previous chief executive Julian Segal.

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When Incitec’s $935 million Moranbah ammonia nitrate plant, due for completion next year, reaches its 330,000 tonne production capacity in fiscal 2015, Incitec’s earnings will leap 20 per cent.

The additional $165 million in earnings will flow through to Incitec’s already strong balance sheet and leave Fazzino with an enormous cash pile to throw at major assets all over the world.

Yet where investment bankers see opportunity, Fazzino sees risk.

The business is now of a size and scale where profit growth can come from within.

“We don’t need to do the company-threatening acquisition," Fazzino says.

“We don’t need to put this business at risk. There is no more challenging a thing to do to a business than to play in M&A. You have to pay 100 per cent of the cash flows, pay a 30 per cent premium minimum on top of that and you are going to buy a business where you only know about it through due diligence."

Instead, he is more attracted to the prospect of expanding Moranbah by a further 100,000 tonnes. “That’s the one that for shareholders drives an extraordinary amount of value," he says.

If Fazzino doesn’t think Incitec’s money is best spent on an acquisition or expansion opportunity, he has a simple plan.

“At the end of the day if you end up with a pile of cash and you don’t know where to put it you give it back to your shareholders.

“It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I think people overestimate it. As CEO my job is to create value for shareholders."

From Incitec’s new offices in Melbourne’s Southbank precinct the evidence of the next stage of the company’s business improvement initiative, called BEx, is on display.

Fazzino’s desk appears as if it has never been touched. On the wall is a framed picture of his clean work station to remind him how his desk must look at the end of the day.

The same system applies to his staff. Routine audits are conducted to ensure everyone is towing the neat-freak line. There isn’t a Post-it note-clad computer screen in sight.

The theory is a clean workplace is a safe one; it’s a more efficient one.

BEx, which stands for business excellence, aims to create more efficient ways of doing business to help drive earnings and reduce costs.

Incitec finds itself in an enviable yet rare position – its twin business units are exposed to both the soft and hard commodities boom being fuelled by surging demand from emerging economies including China.

Even when Incitec’s evenly split earnings shift from 2015, when 70 per cent of earnings will come from its mining services operations thanks to Moranbah, Fazzino sees little reason to carve up the business.

UBS has argued that splitting the group would deliver shareholders 70¢ a share as the market re-rated its explosives division, arguing Incitec’s share price was being muted by the volatility of fertiliser prices.

Yet Fazzino sees greater synergies in the whole.

He argues that its “upstream" production manufactures the same product that is then sold to both mining explosives and fertiliser customers. It gains economies of scale and a broader manufacturing base by servicing both.

“The thing that is really going to drive the profitability is getting the upstream right," he says.

“I’m very happy with the composition of the portfolio."

Fazzino, a self-confessed muscle car lover who owns eight Valiants, says he favours future investment on its mining explosives business because it could deliver stable returns compared with the volatility inherent with agriculture investments.

That doesn’t mean its fertiliser operations won’t grow.

The division, which includes Southern Cross Fertilisers, will for the first time this year sell more fertiliser to offshore customers than to domestic clients as it builds on its global network.

Incitec will sell 1.9 million tonnes in Australia but 2.3 million tonnes offshore.

In five years Fazzino wants the company’s offshore sales to double to nearly 5 million tonnes.

“Our fertiliser business is the best agribusiness in Australia, hands down," he says.